How Not Being Allowed to Walk Means We Are Not Allowed to Think

Our very way of thinking comes in great part from the Ancient Greek way of reasoning and seeing the world. Unlike the oriental tradition which sees value in finding a common ground between two opposing thoughts, Western reasoning postulates that at most one of two contradictory ideas can be true.

The Peripatetic school was a school of philosophy in Ancient Greece where discussions were held as one walked about. Unlike Plato (428/7–348/7 BC), Aristotle (384–322 BC) was not a citizen of Athens and so could not own property; he and his colleagues therefore used the grounds of the Lyceum as a gathering place, just as it had been used by earlier philosophers such as Socrates.

Later on German philosophers walked as they thought: Hegel along the Philosophenweg (the Philosophers' Walk), in Heidelberg; Kant along the Philosophen-damm in Königsberg. Kierkegaard walked along the Philosopher's Way in Copenhagen every day, getting ideas that he would later write down.

In England, Thomas Hobbes even had a walking stick with an inkhorn built into it so that he could jot down his thoughts as he walked. Walking sticks were until recently often beautiful objects, handsomely crafted, nothing like modern day hiking staffs, used by badly clad urbanites to simulate rurality in groups and clutter up what passes for the natural world at the weekend.

Bertrand Russell said of Wittgenstein that he would come to Russell's rooms at midnight and pace around for hours. Wittgenstein had a series of insights about language and thought that are difficult even to put into words they are so conceptual. Language is central to reasoning and it has been shown that each language lends itself to a particular form of thought. To be able to transcend the limits of one's own vocabulary and typical linguistic structures and formulate thoughts that have a universal significance requires stepping outside oneself and observing one's thought processes.

But now, with CV-19, we have our walking drastically limited. In Spain, no walking is allowed at all unless there is an immediate purpose to it, such as going to the local supermarket or taking the dog out, and both have to be frequently justified to the police. In England, you may walk so long as it is not far from your home and a maximum of an hour's walking for exercise is allowed per day. No mindless dawdling allowed.

Walking is the most natural form of transport, requiring no special kit or expenditure except for some decent shoes. The human body is perfectly suited to it and thrives through it. The body and brain is oxygenated and it is good for our lungs. If you spend enough time you can go far and see the world first hand as it is, on a scale that is relevant to humankind.

At the moment, we are not allowed to share time or space with people that are not immediate family. Yet those very conversations with people we are less familiar with, and outside set social contexts, are those that so often lead one to unexpected thoughts at the most unexpected times. Our conversations online, often tapped out on a mobile phone, are a poor substitute for the sort of deep thought and inspiration that can pop up while striding or ambling along, conversing with strangers or lesser acquaintances.

Clearly you can think without moving around - Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist and astrophysicist was an active man in his youth but almost totally immobile in his later years. But in general being crammed into the typical house or flat is not conducive to original thought, less so with the level of distraction, especially visual distraction, we all have, with our mobiles, tablets, emails, Netflix, memes, video messages...

Our current physical immobilization, with our facial expressions covered up by a mask, our capacity to touch also covered up by latex gloves, is without a doubt not the whole story of what is going on. Our future liberties, for a start, are being drastically curtailed under law for the foreseeable future.

Equally worryingly, maybe our intellectual possibilities are also being curtailed.

The germ of this idea is from the writings of Rebecca Solnit (writer and journalist).

How Prisons for Immigrants Were the Model for Imprisoning All of Us

The west's constant military and economic wars and interventionist policies have united with the climate change our economic model has created, and millions of people are on the march. When the coronavirus panic took hold a few weeks ago, people were videoed fighting over toilet roll in supermarkets, so just imagine the effect that bombs, mutilation and death must produce.

Hundreds of thousands have been stopped at the US or European borders for years now, trapped in de facto concentration camps in horrible life-threatening conditions. Thousands have drowned in the Mediterranean. A few brave people have faced jail for trying to save them, in our Alice-through-the-looking-glass world.

Some migrants - what we would have called in better times "refugees" - get through only to have to try to survive by selling tissues or counterfeit goods on the streets or, much worse, finding themselves interned in migration centres that are closed off to visitors and are simply modern-day prisons of the worse sort, where migrants are separated from family members and routinely abused. There are more than 13,000 immigrants interned just in Spain, a country that has some 2 millions citizens living abroad at the moment.

After the Twin Towers fell in 2001 - those two towers that were supposedly impacted by two planes flown by trainee Muslim pilots, although there were in fact three towers that fell -, we collectively decided that it was all right for terrorists to be whisked away to black sites to be tortured for decades without charge, nor habeas corpus of course. In fact they were not terrorists (after all they had not be found guilty of terrorism) but just people, normally only the brown skinned sort though. It is not that we did not know about this. Everybody saw the shocking images from the Abu Ghraib prison, after all.

As the famous poem puts it:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

(Martin Niemöller)

We have not protested loudly enough about these black sites and internment centres. The narrative was that suspected terrorists must be removed, for the good of the rest of us, even if it turns out that they are not terrorists. As Bush Jr's Vice President Dick Cheney put it in 2006: water-boarding (ie torture) of suspected terrorists is a "no brainer". The following US President, Obama, would peruse a list every week of suspected terrorists, most of them inhabitants of the very poorest of villages in rural Pakistan, deciding which were to be assassinated - along with scores of collateral victims -  using drones.

In 2013 Edward Snowden, an IT analyst, became a western outlaw for showing that the US government and others were unlawfully spying on all of us. We are now all of us presumed guilty, rather than innocent. He had a dramatic escape (from possibly the death penalty in the USA) and currently has asylum in Russia. He has been unable to return home since.

Wikileaks brought to light all sorts of criminal acts carried out by all sorts of governments, including in 2010 the notorious Collateral Damage video, in which US military shot down at least a dozen civilians including 2 Reuters journalists in Baghdad, and including small children, and laughed about the indiscriminate slaying as they did so. Chelsea Manning, a soldier in the US military and an intelligence analyst - the whistleblower -, has spent most of her time since then in US jails, receiving massive fines, and under treatment that can only be classified as torture. Julian Assange (Wikileaks) has spent the best part of a decade cooped up, never charged of a crime, and is currently in bad health in the notoriously awful UK Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the US.

These are the West's political prisoners. There are many others. A few people have protested, but the vast majority has not and sees no cause for alarm in how these heroic citizens have been treated by corrupted power.

Meanwhile, obsessing about possible slights to Jewish sensibilities, confusing the notions of Jewish and Zionist, we have failed to extrapolate from the huge crime the Nazis committed, and have not recognised that it was never about the Jews, per se, but about power and the other. Once the other is equated with some dangerous characteristic, be it usury, lack of hygiene, rabid religious sentiment, black beards..., we have unthinkingly allowed them to be demonised.

By the same measures, being confined in one's home during the coronavirus scare is entirely logical. After all, it is the choice between a deadly virus that is killing millions or your whim to step outside. The problem is that it is not killing millions, that your stepping outside makes no difference, and that the right to leave your home and wander around is not a whim.

You might wonder why you should be confined if you are seriously ill - surely the CV-19 should warrant being in a hospital at least. And if CV-19 has such mild symptoms why are we confined in our homes. If, on the other hand, we are not ill, why - again - are we confined? Instead of confining all of us, why are not the very vulnerable encouraged to stay in, with on-site health support and grocery deliveries?

The press is now reporting that quarantine may be lifted for those who have a test result to show that they have antibodies or have been vaccinated, as Bill Gates has suggested. Hello, Brave New World!

To be able to walk around our common world used to be one of the most basic of human rights. Not being allowed to was, until very recently, recognised as a characteristic of the most totalitarian regimes.

The Faustian bargain we entered into when we did not take to the streets and protest the horrific reality of migrant centres and those concentration camps found on our borders has given the Dick Cheneys of this world a free pass to do the same thing to us.